By Sirtuin | New information provides the building blocks and indicators of our future. Discover exciting innovations that clue us in to the next era.

Take that, Snow White<p>Smart mirrors are straight from science fiction. They’re part of an optimistic vision of the future that imagines a world where screens and data are everywhere, ready to feed you whatever information you need at a moment’s notice.<p>But it turns out that building your own smart …

Smartphones can now be used as laboratory-grade medical testing devices thanks to new kit designed by the University of Illinois. The transmission-reflectance-intensity (TRI) analyzer attaches to a smartphone to examine blood, urine or saliva samples as reliably as large, expensive equipment, but …

• <b>Astronomers have detected what may be four roughly Earth-size planets orbiting Tau Ceti, the nearest sun-like star.</b>• <b><br>Two of the worlds appear to orbit within Tau Ceti's habitable zone, though a cloud of debris and asteroids may pose a threat to any life on them.</b>• <b><br>If the result is confirmed, independent</b> …

A new learning strategy could be the end grades as we know it. But the individualized learning could make this revolutionary way to teach better for students.<p>From New York to Vermont, and from Illinois to Idaho, a new kind of education standard is taking root. It's called mastery-based learning, …

Immortality has gone secular. Unhooked from the realm of gods and angels, it’s now the subject of serious investment—both intellectual and financial—by philosophers, scientists, and the Silicon Valley set. Several hundred people have already chosen to be “cryopreserved” in preference to simply …

Current space telescopes are... big. You can't really avoid it given the need for giant lenses and bulky sensors. Lockheed Martin wants to fix that -- the aerospace firm has just released the first images from SPIDER (Segmented Planar Imaging Detector for Electro-Optical Reconnaissance), an optical …

Carbon-free gas to be distributed to industrial users in Liverpool and Manchester, with plans to dilute methane for domestic use<p>Liverpool and Manchester are to be the testbed for an ambitious £600m project aiming to solve the thorny problem of how the government cuts the carbon footprint of the gas …

The results are in: As best we can tell, the universe clumps and expands just how we thought it did. That confirmation comes from the first results of a five-year survey wherein researchers took dark energy into account, observing much more recent cosmic activity than previous methods allowed. The …

We rarely cover claims of “battery breakthroughs” because it’s extremely difficult to distinguish what has real potential and what is simply PR fluff.<p>No one has been harder on those claims than Elon Musk, but now Tesla’s CEO himself tentatively hints a promising upcoming battery breakthrough on the …

Today marks Earth Overshoot Day - the day by which the human race will have used more of Earth's natural resources than the planet can renew in the whole year.<p>Put simply, we use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate and this puts the Earth on an unsustainable …

<b>(CNN) —</b> Scientists are getting one step closer to snipping inherited genetic diseases out of human offspring using a gene-editing technique called CRISPR.<p>For the first time, scientists said, they corrected a gene mutation linked to inherited heart conditions in human embryos using the approach. A …

It’s time to dethrone capitalism’s single-minded directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, laying the foundations for a better, more equitable world<p>Back in February, a college sophomore called Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and put a simple question …

Their admiration for ingenuity and gumption leaves room for opportunists.<p>For decades, Donald Trump has been compared to the legendary showman P.T. Barnum. Trump himself has publicly embraced being likened to a man described by historians as “vulgar, childish, surely just a little crooked.” His …

Blue flowers are rare in nature, and for good reason: the color is usually the result of mutations and quirks of acidity levels rather than an actual blue pigment. That makes genetically engineering a blue flower tricky, since you can't just make a straightforward tweak and expect a garden full of …

Astronomers have found an abundance of exoplanets, but no exomoons. Despite ongoing efforts, the tiny celestial bodies have just been too elusive to detect using modern technology. However, researchers might have just hit paydirt. They've used Kepler Space Telescope data to discover signs of what …